Losers (8 page)

The bus pulled up right into a terminal near City Hall. I climbed off the back doors, skated down the stairs, and sprung, feetfirst, into the crowd.

I had no destination. I had no deadline—well, not unless you counted factory work, which I didn't anymore. I had no plans, except to walk around, maybe get a coffee, and check out the center of the city that had taken half my life.

It really did feel like landing on another planet. It's not like I'd never been downtown—my parents used to take me every year for the Fourth of July and the New Year's parades—but I'd never felt it out in terms of being an actual city.

Chestnut Street felt just like the movies, homely Colonial trees leisurely draped across buildings, their brick walls a red as fresh as just-cooked bread. It was four or so in the afternoon, too early for businesses to let out, but a few businesspeople crawled the streets anyway, window-shopping and laughing with unseen spouses on their cell phones.

Most people I was watching, though, were of another caliber entirely.

The first one I noticed was a girl. Tall, thin, with impossibly long and stringy hair, she was wearing all black, but her clothes were varied enough in style and texture, a tweed black vest over a shiny black shirt, so they didn't even look all black. She was older than me, but only by a few years, her skin still fresh and soft and unwrinkled, her iPod sticking out from a pocket of her vest. I watched her go by, not checking her out, more just staring in awe of her. It was so cool. I'd never judged a person by their
clothes before, but her clothes were so cool, it was impossible not to. She was the kind of person, I decided in a flash, that I could grow up to be.

She passed me in her flurry of a walk, disappeared inside a record store a few buildings down. I debated following her in—and do what? Stalk her?—but life didn't give me a chance. I spotted a whole group (of kids? people? girls and guys together?) walking along the other side of the street. I ducked between two cars, trailed behind them for a block or so, following as they cut along side streets, walked in the middle, ignoring cars and traffic lights. The whole time, they were talking about this book they'd all read.

I'd read that book last year.

At the time, I'd wanted to talk about it with someone, with anyone, but I couldn't find anyone in the Yards who'd even heard of it. I'd sat Vadim down, expecting him to at least listen to me, but when I told him, he was like, “What do you want to tell me about a book for?” If they didn't have comics or quantum theory in them, Vadim said, you might as well just hide books in a library where nobody would ever read them.

I lost track of them and of their conversation about the time we crossed onto a small street where winding ivy blanketed all the buildings like camouflage. There was a tiny coffeehouse about halfway down, drenched in the wafting scents of smoke and ground coffee beans. The few vacant tables outside (it was starkly warm outside, still summer, but just barely) belied its packed interior. More of these creatures sat inside there, talking to one another, typing away on laptops and reading books and posing in their seats. They wore wacky, nonjudgmental clothes, goofy plaids and neon paisleys, Sherlock Holmes hats and
tacky ‘80s belts. Each of them looked like the kind of person I could become best friends with and talk to for hours.

I wanted to find out how to start.

I went in and ordered a café au lait, very nervous when I pronounced the name. I took it, along with the fortune cookie that came on the saucer, and sat at the vacant end of a long, packed table. Café au lait was just coffee with milk, but somehow it always tasted better than when I tried pouring milk in my regular coffee—some sort of barista magic that only those professionally trained in the ways of the coffeehouse could bring about. I wanted to take out my journal and write—following the example of the plurality of the folks in the coffeehouse—but, I realized ashamedly, I didn't have a journal. I contented myself with taking out one of the spiral notebooks from my new semester of school (all our teachers wanted us to have three-ring binders, anyway) and started writing lines from my new songs in there, verses of poems I had to memorize in years past, anything I could think of to keep my hands busy. My eyes were surveying the people around me, their habits and conversations and eccentric, nonconformist ways of existing, and suddenly, thrillingly, it felt like a mission.

I wanted to learn how to be like this. Older. Independent. Untouchable.

I
thought I had everything totally figured out. I kept feeling that way, right up to the second I stepped into my house.

“Jupiter, you cannot quit the work now. This is family business, and you are family. If you want to live in our house, you must pitch in to help us keep the house. You not understand that?” That was my mother. She was always yanking the umbilical cord when she needed to reel me in.

I pretended to ignore her.

That brought in the second wave of assault, my father, who was a less effective communicator but would not give up so easily. “Jupiter, you listen now! We bring you to this country! We make you good living, pay for good food. Now worst time of year for us. You need help us!”

I turned around, finally acknowledging their existence. “Look, guys,” I said in the calmest, most rational voice I could muster. “I realize this is a difficult season for the operation, and you're both under a lot of pressure to perform and to succeed. And I am perfectly capable of realizing that the corporation has
done us a great favor by letting us live here. I just can't manage the time right now. I'm sorry, but I really can't.”

“This is no excuse, we know high school is hard but we need you.”

“You don't know anything,” I said. “You've never gone through this. You don't understand.”

“We understand! You not understand! We understand!”

“Mommmm
—”

“Jupiter,
viros umnik na moyu golovu
—”

This is what they did, pulling out all the stops. When they reached the limits of their English, they retreated into their native tongue.

“Mom, I don't want to—”

“
Poka tebe tvadsat odin ne ispolnitsa budesh rabotat kak milenkiy
—”

“
Stop it!
”

Whoa. That came out about fifty thousand times louder than I'd intended it to sound. Actually, the voice that came up from my trachea and out through my lips was huge and vibrating, louder than I ever thought it could go. I took a few steps back. We all took a few steps back.

But I could feel the veins in my wrist throbbing, the anger in my body still hot.

“I'm serious,” I said. “Stop speaking Russian. I am
through
with that language. I'm just through with it. Never speak it to me again. If you want to yell at me, do it in English.”

I waited, panting. It was this weird showdown that we hadn't known was a showdown until just now. All of a sudden, none of us was sure what to do.

After a few beats, I stopped standing there and went up to my
room. I swung open my window and climbed out on the roof, savoring the cold Septemblurry air, breathing in deep gulps of freedom.

I was sitting in a used bookstore on Second Street, thinking very hard about things that felt too unimportant to waste my time thinking about—how to become independent and untouchable—but mostly, I was just loitering. It seemed like for every minute I spent in active participation with other human beings my own age, I required half an hour of time to digest and process the experience. At this exact moment I was thinking about Vadim, wondering if there was an actual mathematical equation to take someone like us—an antisocial, emotionally isolated Russian Jewish kid with no cultural background and nothing in common with anyone at our school but age—and turn him popular. Subtract sixty percent of an accent, divide by the amount of people who recognize you by sight, recalibrate into terms of a warehouse party in (everyone-but-me-wise, anyway) the middle of nowhere, and the figure that emerges will be…what?

Actually, that was a lie. I was curled up in an armchair big enough to hold three of me, leafing through ancient hardcover books and glazing over the words. Sometimes, I would stop on a random complicated word,
epistle
or
catatonic
or
kumquat,
and try to put it into the context of my life. I mouthed the word several times, tasted the way my gums moved. I imagined saying it to Devin Murray, to Bates, and then to Margie.

I glanced up from the book. The words were blurring together, and the language started looking way too twirly and snakelike—too much like doodles, not enough boxes. In the
window, a figure hurried past in a brown-and-white restaurant uniform and a short blond bob cut.

“Margie?” I called out, forgetting the barrier of glass.

I hurried out from the store, tried to catch up with the vanishing figure, but she had already turned the corner. Meanwhile, the clerk from the store had called after me, seeing as I was still holding the book that I hadn't paid for. I sighed. Time to pull the no-speakee-the-English routine and get out of it.

“It's called
college
,” Vadim said to me in school, between classes, when we finally had a chance to meet up. “You go away to college, and you start acting like that. It's all a side effect of smoking too much pot. People act crazy for a year or two, realize their parents aren't around to make sure they're dressing normal and scoring good grades, and then they either get their act together or they flunk out.”

“Is that how it works?” I said. “Why are you thinking so much about college all of a sudden? I feel like it's been a year since we hung out.” I checked my class schedule in my head. It was Friday when I'd gone to his house, and now it was Wednesday. Not an eon, but long enough for my life to completely change its essence and purpose.

“A year? You're so dramatic, Jupiter. I've just been up to my own stuff.” He cracked a hint of a smile. “Hey, what's up with your voice?”

“My voice?” I said. I cleared my throat, gurgled my saliva, and said it again. “What's wrong with my voice?”

“Your accent,” he said. “You sound like an amoeba with laryngitis. Why you are talking so funny?”

Vadim's grammar slip-ups—how did I always notice grammar
slip-ups? Was I that paranoid about my own?—were so rare an occurrence that I had to stop talking totally. I realized we were speaking English even though it was just the two of us.

“It was at the party Friday night,” I said. “I was talking to this girl, and she told me—”

“You were talking? To a girl?”

I couldn't tell whether Vadim was being sarcastic or not.

“Not like
that
!” I said. “I mean, I was talking to girls all night, Vadim. I told you—you utterly should have come.”

“Yeah, right,” Vadim said darkly, as though I had just suggested that he donate a pint of blood to the South Lawn kids.

“But, listen. The party was nothing—it was just school kids, you know? What you
really
need to see is the life downtown.”

It was like I couldn't stay away. Even though Vadim begged off (there was an Odyssey of the Mind meeting after school, or something like that), I had to plunge back in. Last time, I'd left the coffeehouse well before sunset. But this time, I wanted to stay there. I wanted to watch the hours turn.

If the night had gone on for twenty years, if the darkness stretched out forever and became the only experience I ever experienced again, it would have been enough for me. I left the coffeehouse long after dark, an eternity after school had let out.

Once again, I hadn't spoken to anyone there, other than a brief, self-conscious, spoken-into-my-chest “small house coffee.” I didn't need to. Just being there, existing in a universe with them, was enough for me—at least for now. I had the rest of my life to overload myself.

There was a second dusk that only happened downtown, after nightfall, a gradual twinkling of the stars that signified the
city's descent into night. It was the transition between the dinner crowds and the nighttime crowds.

This was the kind of place where Saturday nights happened every night, where people lived every night as a joyous occasion and a potential party, not just as a time to eat dinner and finish homework and text message your geeky Russian friends. They went out as a matter of principle. Nothing was a spectator sport.

My shirt was feeling thin in the rapidly cooling air; my hands were full of coffeehouse flyers that advertised events I knew I would never attend.

And I decided then, at that moment, to come back as often as I could, to walk around and exist downtown as many nights as I could sneak away. It didn't matter if all the concerts were twenty-one and over, or if the people at the cafés looked straight through me. I just wanted to be a part of their world, to absorb everything I could and find someplace that was more real and more lifelike than the Yards.

At home, I expected to find a note on my bedroom door, as was my parents' usual ritual when they were too mad at me to talk. Since I'd already told them they weren't allowed to speak to me in Russian, letter writing was the most obvious and expected tactic that they had left. I braced myself for their shaky, uneven handwriting on dollar-store Post-it notes.

Instead there was a letter, typed on an official-looking letterhead, stuck to the rusty nail that protruded from the door.

I ripped it off my door and, holding it in both hands, scanned it for meat—cutting through the big vocabulary, looking for
the words that mattered. The letter was addressed to my parents, from the management company that owned our factory. It was written in thick English, in the impenetrable language of tax forms and immigrant registration documents. But it was still understandable. It said that—good news!—the market for our product was expanding and, hence, the needs of production for our factory was expected to double. They needed to install an additional assembly line, and thus, due to the increased need for space, the family currently residing there, the Glazers, might be asked to vacate their private quarters, and, just in case, they should take an inventory of all personal belongings, gather them together, and start packing up.

The trouble with being idealistic was that everything that didn't fulfill my ideals felt like a compromise. Wanting to be a downtown, bohemian, intellectual non-Yards resident was one thing, but once I got there, once I freed myself of the Yards, what was I going to do? I sat for hours in cafés with all these amazing people—I was
sure
they were amazing—but, beyond knowing there was a bigger destiny out there for me, what was I doing? Being a musical connoisseur and talking about indie punk band concerts was great, but with no money, there was no way I could actually get
into
a concert. And I kept waiting for that girl to talk to me, that unspeakably cool girl with cellophane eyes, cream-soda skin, and a native fluency in the love clichés of rock song lyrics, but she was really taking her time showing up.

In the meantime, North Shore was doing its best to keep me distracted.

Breasts. I was surrounded by breasts.

Indian summer hit that weekend, and on Monday, girls' clothes were coming off like old dead skin. Tank tops. Spaghetti straps. Short shorts, bodysuits, tube tops, capris. In town, girls wore all different kinds of clothes. The coffee-shop girls still weren't talking to me, but each time I walked in, I got more approving nods in my direction. Each shy smile that I flashed at a girl, I got closer and closer to becoming convinced that not only did she see it and understand its meaning, but she was one step away from coming over to talk to me, swap iPod playlists, and take me to the always-deserted downstairs seating section for a heavy, sweaty, full-on make-out session. After all, if high school girls made out all the time at school and parties, then why wouldn't college girls (at least I assumed they were in college) be into making out at coffeehouses? They dressed differently—less obviously sexily, in washed-out fall colors and loosely hanging T-shirts and cardigans—but wasn't that just because they were more slyly sexy, because they already knew what they wanted and they knew how to get it? North Shore girls were less experimental, more obvious in their intentions. The other day, Devin said hi to me and I turned in her direction and she was wearing this shirt that was basically a sports bra—you could totally see her belly button, a stomach as tight and taut as a movie screen—and I couldn't even muster the tongueular skills to say hello back.

All of this seemed to come at a fast, clashing redirection to the phantoms of intellectuality and artisticness I'd been chasing around. The other day I had spent two hours in a downtown art
gallery doing not much but staring at the paintings, treating the place like it was a museum. There was a girl sitting at a desk (tied-back black hair, sleeveless dress) who kept shooting glances at me, as if to say that it wasn't a place for museumgoers like me. I found a flyer for a concert the weekend after next, this band I'd never heard of. All the flyers were made from linoleum woodcuts, a full round moon and the silhouettes of a werewolf and a country preacher. They looked unbelievably cool.

I started to rethink Devin's invitation to watch movies with a bunch of friends Friday night, which I'd just turned down. I started to wonder if the girl of my dreams wasn't just as likely to be hiding underneath a set of perfectly globular, slightly protrusive breasts, inflated slightly by a mercilessly tight baby-tee, still olive from a lingering August tan, lurking backstage at a concert of a band called Prowler.

But first I had to get through the week.

Monday night was spent at home with my parents, the farthest scene from a Prowler concert that I can imagine. I picked at my dinner, not in the mood for it. Not in the mood for any of this.

“The warehouse it was a crazy-people place today,” said my father. “Two new factory want to order from us, and we are already behind on three factory order. If we say yes, we lose the order we already have. If no, then we may not to get another chance.”

“Yeah, Dad,” I said, rolling my peas through the spears of a fork. “It's a conundrum.”

I used the word even though I was well aware that he probably didn't know what it meant. I didn't know why he was talking about this, not with me at the table. I mean, my mom already
knew all the details, and he had to know that I didn't care. And it was true; I really didn't. What was it going to affect me whether we moved to somewhere that was even colder and trashier than this? If there was anywhere in the entire city worse than this place, it was hard to imagine.